SIMFEROPOL (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd March, 2020) Hendrik Weber, the president of the People's Diplomacy Norway association, called visa denial to Crimea's representative, who wanted to participate in a conference on the peninsula in Norway, sad news.
On Saturday, Aleksandr Mashchenko, the head of the International Affairs Office of the V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University, said that he was denied a visa to visit Norway to attend the conference. According to Norway, Mashchenko's Russian passport is an invalid travel document for the European Union, as it was issued in Crimea after its reunification with Russia. At the same time, Mashchenko emphasized that the Norwegian embassy invited him to visit the country using a Ukrainian biometric passport.
Weber, who is also the organizer of the conference, told Sputnik that the visa denial represented pressure, a ban on freedom of opinion and was very sad news, as it demonstrated that the Norwegian government did not want to listen to the real voices of people from the peninsula. He called the decision regrettable.
The association's president stressed that he would further attempt to invite representatives from Crimea to attend the event.
The conference, dubbed "Crimea in a geopolitical perspective," is set to take place in Oslo on March 27 and will gather speakers from across the world to discuss the peninsula.
